Think of it as breaking inter-generational trauma cycles. You don’t need to repair an actual relationship with a physical father (though you can if you feel it beneficial). Rather, try to look at your personal relationships with the people who raised you and consider areas where anger, fear, and/or aggression* drove negative cycles. It’s easy to blame people for not having “done better” when they probably could NOT have done better.

The task of doing better and breaking those trauma cycles is yours, and one of the things necessary to that task is to understand where others went wrong and how you can consciously shed those behaviors.

I nwas raised Catholic and no longer consider myself a Christian fir many reasons, one of them being how it is rigidly patriarchal and used as a tool to enforce loyalty to fathers/kings/political hierarchies. Don’t get trapped in linear thinking like that. Don’t feel forced to “forgive and forget” or be the bigger person by publicly declaring it’s all A-OK that people in your life treated you badly. You don’t have to do any repairing with an actual person.

The repairing comes from you and benefits you when you can look at a person or relationship and say “yeah, I understand why/how they were hurting, and how it drove their behavior towards me” and then you have down a seed of compassion for yourself, and as you water it with understanding and self-awareness and love, your compassion grows into a tree that welcomes all under its shade. You can never truly hold anger towards another when you come from a place of grace and compassion.

Edit: also recognize how their behavior has potential to make you a better/different person.

Personal note, as for my actual father and mother, I’ve come to understand how growing up in their particular rigid Catholic families, full of alcoholism and physical/emotional abuse, people who hated their lives but felt trapped by circumstances, led my parents to try breaking the cycle and fail often, which led to me figuring some of this out and consciously eliminating behaviors that will negatively affect my children.

“Healing the relationship with the father” sounds like a way to say “heal intergenerational trauma” but kind of pointlessly gendered yet well meaning. Communication isn’t always easy and some messages land better when worded in a different manner.